This is about as crazy as it gets...

Lately, I have been obsessed with the stocks. They sit in our bedroom. I haven't been in the stocks since before the hysterectomy -- well over a year and a half. He sometimes threatens to put me in them, if I am fussy in a session, but in practice, the stocks have become a blanket rack. I don't know how I'd respond to being "in" the stocks at this point. My memory of being in them is that it was always mentally and emotionally difficult to just get there. But still, they are filling my imagination, lately -- and in the oddest way. I am not obsessing about being "in" the stocks. I really don't want to be "in" the stocks. And yet I seem to be just fascinated with them right now.

I am continually drawn to the notion of wanting to sleep in the base of the stocks. It is crazy really. I'm not even sure I could get my long, gangly frame curled into that space, and yet there is something that pulls at me. I wake up in the middle of the night and I swear I can "hear" them calling to me. I want to take a blanket and a pillow and just find a way to get myself into that space. There is something that feels to me as if sleeping there would be safe and enclosed and protected and connected somehow.

I don't entirely understand it. I wonder if it is like what I used to do in the days when I faced daily paddlings (when the requirement was that I would go to Him each day, with the paddle, and ask for Him to paddle me). I struggled terribly through that time period. The daily sessions of 100 paddle strokes became increasingly difficult to endure and to ask for as the weeks went on -- and I came to a point, eventually, where I would actually sleep with the paddle. It wasn't anything He suggested or required, I simply began at some point taking the paddle to bed with me, as if somehow holding it through the night would make it easier to cope with the next day.

I haven't gone to sleep in the bottom of the stocks. If He woke up and found me missing from His bed, He'd have an absolute fit, and there'd be no end of grief. I don't want those stocks. I don't want the switching He has mentioned a couple of times this summer. I don't want the daily "whip practice" that He promised late in the spring just before school ended. There is an entirely logical part of my brain that tells me that I will HATE those things if they actually happen, and that, if I say, "yes that is what I want," I will simply disappoint in the event.

I suspect that a good part of what is going on here is that I may need things that I don't really want. This is hard. I'm not a starry-eyed newbie, eager to try all sorts of interesting "fantasies." I've tried all the things I used to fantasize about. I know what happens when the paddles and whips start to swing -- it hurts like hell. I know that I'll cry and scream and beg and do anything within my power to make it stop. I know that, at the point that I ask for something, my ability to negotiate the levels of it all simply vanishes. The minute that I give voice to it, it becomes entirely His domain, and His domain is scary. It doesn't change the needing. Clearly, my mind will go where my courage will not. Until it drives me completely nuts.

swan